Kirsty Johnston – “Creeps and the Critics: Disability Theatre’s Challenges for Journalism”

Kirsty Johnston, a disability performance scholar from the University of British Columbia, will offer a talk entitled “Creeps and the Critics: disability theatre’s challenges for journalism.” Recently produced in both Seattle (2014)  and Vancouver (2016), David Freeman’s 1971 New York Drama Desk award winning play Creeps has posed significant critical challenges for both artists and critics. The play is important for disability theatre and performance scholars not least because it is the first offered by Victoria Ann Lewis in her landmark 2006 collection, Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights. Emphasizing Freeman’s pioneering decision in Creeps to feature many different disabled characters in cahoots and argument together, Lewis argues that Creeps “prematurely [bore] theatrical witness to wrongs that would not find political analysis and advocacy until later in the decade” (xxxiv). The recent staged readings and productions have generated complex artistic and critical responses.